“That didn’t take long,” Shelly said.

Brian looked closely at one of the fingertips. “I’ll bet it was looking for a specific wavelength — probably that of chlorophyll. Anyone got a potted plant?”

“No,” Shelly said, “but I have a vase of flowers in my office.”

“Perfect. I want to see Bug-Off off a few bugs before we strip it down.”

This time the machine was more cooperative. It rolled toward the vase, started at the base and quickly worked its way up the stems to the flowers. Once it was finished it bleeped with satisfaction and shut down.

“How do we get to see the bugs?” Brian asked.

“I’ll show you.” Ben twisted the lower segment of each arm and removed the containers built into them. “I’ll shake these onto a sheet of paper and we’ll take a look at the catch.”

He clicked open the lids and carefully tilted the contents out onto the paper.

“All those were on my flowers!” Shelly was horrified. “Spiders, flies — even some ants.”

“All dead too,” Brian said with admiration. “This spider has had her head neatly cut off! That takes great precision and discrimination. Let me get a magnifying glass and look at the rest of the debris.” He bent close and poked the dead bugs around with a pencil point. “There are very small aphids here, and some kind of insect that is even smaller, like powder, parasites or mites of some kind.” He straightened up and smiled. “I don’t think you could do all this with anything less than my AI techniques — though I could be wrong. Let’s look inside the thing and see what we have.”

The metal canister came off easily, obviously designed only for protection of the working parts. Brian used a screwdriver as a pointer to trace the circuitry.

“Here’s the power line, coded red, a five-volt power pair. Standard. And a single two-way fiber-optic signal pipe. Everything looks right off the shelf — so far. Standard voltage-to-voltage converters along with interface chips. They’ve been disconnected.”

“The FBI must have done that,” Ben said. “I bet you’ll find the matching plug on whatever passes for a central processor.”

“There it is,” Shelly said, pointing to a square metal box mounted on the side of the frame.

Ben examined the canister from all sides, using a minor and light to see behind and under it. “Since I’ve been involved with industrial security I’ve seen this kind of thing pretty often. Sealed shut and meant to be kept that way. Whatever is inside generates heat — see the heatsink there. But the fan blows over these ribs on the heatsink so there is no need for an opening into the thing. See this seam? Welded shut with one of the super-adhesives that end up stronger than the metal. We’re not going to get into it easily — so let’s not try. There is a lot we can find out without taking a hacksaw to it. But you’ll have to go in eventually,” Ben said.

“Maybe — but I’ll try not to. There has to be a backup battery inside to hold whatever is programmed in DRAM whenever the main battery is disconnected. Considering all the other booby-trap switches in this thing, there is bound to be another one to detect any attempt to open it.”

“Which will short the battery through the circuitry inside?” Shelly said.

“Exactly. But you don’t determine intelligence by dissecting the brain! Let’s map all the circuitry and find out exactly how it works first. Then we can run some controlled tests…”

Brian felt a light tap on his shoulder and turned to see that the AI was standing behind him.

“Is this machine the Bug-Off machine?”

“It is, Sven. You want to take a look at it?”

“Yes.”

It reached up to the tabletop with one of its treelike manipulators and pulled itself up onto the surface in a single flowing movement. The eyestalks extended and moved down the motion-less machine. It was a quick examination, over in a few moments.

“Hypothesis of AI circuitry and processor now beyond any reasonable doubt.”

“That’s what we want to hear,” Brian said. “Stay there, Sven — you are going to run this examination.”

“I’ll get out of your way,” Ben said. “Let me know as soon as you find anything out. I’ll be in my office. I have a lot of calls to make.”

“Will do. Let me lock you out.”

The investigation of DigitTech was well under way. Benicoff phoned Agent Dave Manias, who had been in charge of the FBI end of the investigation from the first. A different agent answered the phone.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Benicoff, but he’s not here. He said when you rang to tell you he was on the way to see you.”

“Thanks.” He hung up. It could be important if Manias didn’t want to use the phone. Patience, he would just have to be patient.

He was finishing his second cup of coffee and pacing the length of the office when Manias came in.

“Speak,” Ben said. “I have been wearing out the carpet here ever since I got your message.”

“Everything is going fine. I’ll tell you all about it while you pour me a large black coffee. You may have slept last night but yours truly never even saw a bed.”

“My heart bleeds for you,” Ben said with total lack of sympathy. “Come on, Dave, stop the stalling. What’s happened? Here.”

“Thanks.” Manias dropped onto the sofa and sipped the coffee. “We had the DigitTech corporation under surveillance as soon as we got your report. It’s not too big an operation, a hundred and twenty employees about. We’ve got an agent inside.”

“So fast? I’m impressed.”

“It was luck, mainly. One of the secretaries got the flu. We had a tap in first thing, so we heard their call for a temp. One of our agents filled it. She is a software programmer with plenty of office experience, and has done this kind of thing before. Insider dealing, business crime. Everything is in the records if you know how and where to look — and she knows. There is a lot of money invested in this Bug-Off machine. An entire new wing to the original factory building was put up, plenty of expensive machinery involved.”

“Has she gotten into the company records yet?”

“All of them. As always the locks were the usual simple codes, phone numbers, the wife’s name, you know the kind of thing. This was made simpler by the fact that the head bookkeeper has his access codes written on a card taped inside a drawer of his desk. I mean — really!”

“A good — or maybe a bad sign. If they have something to hide they would surely hide it a lot better than that.”

“You never can tell. Most crooks aren’t very smart.” He put a GRAM block on the desk. “In any case — here is everything we have up to now. Company records going back to the day they opened. We’re getting bio material on all the company’s principal executives now. You’ll have that as soon as we do.”

“Any conclusions yet?”

“Too early times, Ben. I’ll take another cup if you’re pouring. They seemed to be getting into financial trouble a while back, but they went public and raised more than they needed.”

“I’ll want to know who owns the stock.”

“Will do. Do you think these are the people we are looking for?”

“We’ll know pretty soon. If they are selling a commercial AI they had better have plenty of records of whoever did the research and how it was developed. If they don’t have that — then we are in luck and they are in trouble.”

When Brian hadn’t called by five o’clock Ben walked over to the lab. The front door was almost hidden behind a jungle of small plants and trees in tubs; he had to climb over them to get to the door. It looked like all of the local nurseries had been cleaned out. He reached up and snapped his fingers in front of the pickup lens above the door.

“Anyone there?”

“Hi, Ben. I was just going to call you. Interesting things happening in here. Just a second.”

There were plants inside and around the workbench. The first thing Ben saw was that Bug-Off and the AI were apparently locked in tender embrace. The AI was standing close to the partially dismembered machine with its multibranching digits closely entwined in its innards.